It was only a matter of time, even if that time is a good decade-and-a-half. Monica Lewinsky, the world’s most prominent intern, has done what you now need to do to deal with your past “shame” — flaunt it under the vague guise of female empowerment.

We must concede that if you like this kind of floor show, Monica’s appearance this week was riveting. Glossed lips aquiver, impeccable big hair, she is by turns tearful, regretful, bold, defiant. The lesson — and there must be one to justify the whole palaver — is that youthful shame must be “owned”.

She was let down more by bien pensant feminists, whom she blames more than the boss who deployed her for oral sex in the White House, then treated her as a target for implausible deniability until forced to come clean about “that woman”.

Brave Monica speaks in oven-ready phrases that sound like they were concocted by an over-slick PR team rather than a mature woman looking back on a messy time of life. She wants to “give purpose to my past” and help others whose sex lives are vengefully spread via anti-social networks. How is a bit unclear — the tragic story of a gay American student who committed suicide after his sexual encounter was published on social media by a callous room-mate is dragged out opportunistically to justify a rampant piece of self-promotion.

And there is a glaring great hole in the account of Monica’s suffering at the hands of an exploitative media, namely that she was remarkably helpful in spreading her story at the time. Like many people who dance with the devil of publicity about their private lives, her main complaint is that she did not have full control of the saga (surprise!). She would look at accounts of her sort-of affair in horror because facts would be “out of context” — though those of us who covered the story can remember perfectly well that Lewinsky was a very willing participant in flattering photo-shoots. Discretion was not the modus operandi.

The only credible grounds for the timing of this self-examination is that the indestructible, calculating Clintons are en route back to the White House, this time with Hillary as candidate. It must be galling.

And no one would begrudge the more mature Monica stepping out to argue for companies to take a firmer line on sexual exploitation of young staff, or even to tell us that however dramatic personal disasters feel when you are 22, the world soon moves on and so do you.

What grates is the confected justification for a spread in Vanity Fair and another brief moment of tainted stardust dressed up as a moral campaign. Lewinsky, as the columnist Maureen Dowd adeptly put it, “is in danger of exploiting her own exploitation”. It is enough to make us hanker for the common sense of a more consistent feminist, the late Kirsty MacColl, whose musical commentary on the Bill and Monica meltdown in Here Comes That Man Again was straightforward: “Another stain on another blue dress.”

It happens. It shouldn’t. Think twice, bright young women, should the opportunity come your way. It tends to work out better for the male boss than you, and there are better routes to fame and fortune. And when it is over, let it be.